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Monday, October 27, 2014

The Other Side of Doris

The very name Doris Day conjures sunshine, happiness, sweetness and light. She brought smiles to the faces of millions with her ebulliently positive persona, wholesome good looks and angelic singing voice. Eternally, she’ll be known as the epitome of the girl next door...an image manufactured by Hollywood but largely embraced by the star herself, a down-to-earth midwestern girl from Cincinnati. In the Eisenhower ’50s, Day’s purity and virtue were held in high esteem, but that didn’t stop pianist and wit Oscar Levant from caustically joking that he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin. Her apple-pie image made her a star...but pigeonholed her into too-often bland film roles.

A natural actress, Day rarely had the opportunity to exercise her strong flair for drama, except for a few non-singing forays into the mystery and thriller genres. Personally, I prefer her work in films like Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Julie and Midnight Lace to either her early Warner Brothers musicals or her frothy 1960s sex comedies with Rock Hudson, Cary Grant and James Garner. Day always sparkles, but often in spite of her material.

But what is arguably Doris Day’s greatest film performance combines both her musical and dramatic skills. As Ruth Etting in the biopic Love Me Or Leave Me (1955), Doris Day cemented her status as a lasting superstar by playing decidedly against type. Day’s first film as a freelance star, after a seven-year-long indentured servitude as a contract player at Warner Brothers, Love Me or Leave Me boasts a strong script, a juicy role for Doris, a selection of musical standards for her to sing, lushly arranged in high-MGM style, and a legendary costar who kept her on her toes in some highly dramatic scenes.

The dynamic performances of Cagney and Day

This film truly crackles with excitement in Day’s scenes with James Cagney, who plays Ruth Etting’s aggressive, crude and domineering manager husband, Marty “the Gimp” Snyder. Doris more than holds her own against Jimmy, one of the screen’s most iconic tough guys, and the pair create remarkable screen chemistry together. The combative, love-hate relationship of Etting and Snyder is beautifully realized in the tense and gripping square-offs between Day and Cagney, both actors giving surprisingly strong performances.

As Ruth, Doris wavers between admiration and appreciation for Snyder lifting her out of the dancehall and jump-starting her singing career, and fear and revulsion at his crudity and strong-arm tactics. Day should have been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her triple-threat performance. The scene in which she’s reduced to utter hysteria as Cagney’s character hits her, knocks her down onto the bed and prepares to rape her (on the couple’s wedding night) is some of Day’s very best onscreen work.

It’s Cagney’s last great role, too, in which he pays homage to his own iconic image of the violent bad guy, but adds touches of humor and vulnerability that he only rarely displayed in his early Busby Berkeley musicals and his Oscar-winning performance as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy. For his performance in Love Me or Leave Me, Cagney earned his final Academy Award nomination as Best Actor.

The film contains some of Day’s best musical numbers, too, including one that highlights her flair for dancing as well as singing. (Day’s original ambition was to be a hoofer until her legs were crushed in a freak train accident as a teenager.) Her performance of “Shakin’ the Blues Away” in the Ziegfeld Follies sequence is fortified with verve, and while she’s no Ann Miller, Miss Day can move. She really sells it. And her vocal renditions of "Everybody Loves My Baby," “You Made Me Love You” and “Ten Cents a Dance” are utterly sublime.

Her portrayal of a street-smart dancehall hostess smoking, drinking and carousing in nightclubs provided her a change of pace, and Doris Day garnered almost unanimous raves for her multilayered performance, but not everyone was thrilled. She actually received a considerable amount of hate mail from her conservative fan base that preferred to see her continue to play sunny virgins or dutiful wives and mothers. Day, herself a Christian Scientist who had a soda fountain installed in her home to take the place of a bar, gloried in the freedom the role gave her to explore a darker side.

If she looks a little different in this film than in any other, it’s by design. Director Charles Vidor preferred to shoot her from what she considered her “bad” side, which had a cheekier and harder look appropriate to the shrewd and ambitious character she was playing. This is the first and only film in which Day allowed herself to be photographed from the left side. (On a later picture, even the handsome Cary Grant had to accede to her request and allow himself to be filmed on his own “bad side” to accommodate Day.)

After nearly a decade of playing bland ingenues, little sister types and arm candy to male stars from Ronald Reagan to Frank Sinatra at Warner Brothers, Doris Day had reinvented herself. Soon she’d work with Hitchcock, and then begin producing films on her own with her husband and manager Martin Melcher. Four years later, she’d earn her only Oscar nod for the souffle-light Pillow Talk and begin a long reign as Hollywood’s #1 box office star. But it was as Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me where she reached her cinematic zenith as actress, performer and legendary star.

7 comments:

Hi ChrisCouldn't agree more with your assessment of this, my favorite Doris Day film -in spite of the term, "Doris Day film" conjuring up an image entirely different from this cynical romance.Although she is an actress obviously very happy with the legacy of films and music she has contributed to, it's hard not to look at her in this dramatic role and wonder what might have been had she had the kind of management (or following) to allow for the jumping back and forth between dramatic and comedic roles (like say, Rosalind Russell). She is so terrific in this, and she and Cagney go nose to nose (not easy with his height) beautifully .A great factoid that, about her having a "bad side," I'd never heard that before! Thanks for covering this film, your fondness for it and Doris Day really comes through!

Hi Ken - thanks for dropping by - so delighted that you share my love for this film and for Doris's hidden talent as a serious actor.

I wish she had participated in the cinematic revolution that was happening in the 1960s and 1970s and done something even more daring...she had the opportunity to play the ultimate cougar Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate but turned it down...Anne Bancroft was terrific, but Day would have brought an entirely different subtext.

Back in 1989 Miss Day was presented with a special Lifetime Achievement Golden Globe, and in her acceptance speech, she admitted she was dying to come back and do more films, but it never happened. Que sera, sera...

I'll have to track this one down and see it again -- it's been years but I remember that Day was very effective. MAD Magazine used to razz poor Day mercilessly -- her freckles, her "white bread" look -- but she was a likable and talented performer, wonderful in the Hitchcock film (and I believe, contrary to rumor, Hitch was pleased with her as well.)

Hey William - thanks for coming by! Yes, my other Doris Day favorite is the Hitchcock film with Jimmy Stewart. I love the scene where Stewart gives her sedatives before he tells her their son has been kidnapped...and literally crumbles before our eyes.

I will have to look up the old MAD magazines again--I don't remember the Doris Day parodies, but I do remember how they razzed Streisand, calling her Bubby Strident!

This is a really interesting article. I have watched this film, and I find it fascinating. I always like James Cagney. You did an excellent job of describing this unusual role for Doris Day. You are a good writer.

By the way, I would like to invite you to join "The Second Annual Great Breening Blogathon." This blogathon, which will be taking place on October 12-17, is a celebration of the Code, its Era, and its enforcer, Joseph I. Breen. We are using this blogathon to honor Joseph Breen on his 130th birthday, which would have been on October 14. However, we are extending the blogathon to October 17 to celebrate the second anniversary of PEPS, which was founded on October 17, 2016. You can participate by breening a film that is not from the Breen Era (1934-1954) or by analyzing a Code films. You can also discuss an aspect of the Code, its influence on Hollywood, or Mr. Breen itself. You can find out more and join here: https://pureentertainmentpreservationsociety.wordpress.com/2018/09/27/announcing-the-second-annual-great-breening-blogathon/.

I would also like to invite you to join a blogathon which my sister, Rebekah, is hosting in November. On November 9-11, PEPS is hosting the Claude Rains Blogathon in honor of this marvelous actor's 129th birthday on November 10. You can read the announcements and sign up here: https://pureentertainmentpreservationsociety.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/five-minutes-everybody-the-curtains-going-up-on-the-claude-rains-blogathon/.